Tuesday, January 21, 2014

I just got this postcard in the mail, probably because my company is on a mailing list for Visi, a longtime Twin Cities internet service provider:

The front side shows the logos for Visi and four other companies -- four with some variant of the swoosh) -- which are combining forces...

...to form a new company that will keep the name of one of the five original companies. That company's name is OneNeck.

Am I the only one who doesn't get that name?

What the heck does it mean? Why is it supposed to inspire me to buy services from them? Neck is not a noun I associate with anything except maybe pain in the neck. And, oh yeah, bottleneck, which seems almost synonymous with OneNeck.

They decided to change the font used in the logo, at least. They got rid of the Rotis Serif and its 1990s idea of what high-tech looked like, and replaced it with a European-style sans serif. Kind of generic, but what can you do:

Unfortunately, they decided to keep the strange logo mark.

What is that shape? What does it have to do with necks? Is it supposed to be a squashed analog clock, maybe? A tunnel with a bird flying through it? A bottomless Rotis O with a mustache?

My primary way of seeing it is as a very stylized female figure: long hair flowing around a woman's body, which is suggested only by a triangular crotch shape.

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Third of four daughters, raised in a rural area outside of a small town. Now living in a moderately large city, making media and immersed in other people's media. Finally cleaning out the filing cabinet and loading its contents to the cloud.